In a society that makes a fetish of "bipartisanship," whatever that means, those who make a political argument must make it seem like they eschew naked self-interest and pure partisanship.

And so people bend over backward to cloak partisan politics in a "principled argument," the assumption being that "principled arguments" have more validity and are somehow more noble.

Earlier this week, this paper had a front page story about a group of local citizens threatening a lawsuit against Entergy, owner of the Pilgrim nuke plant in Plymouth.

In a letter sent last week to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Entergy Nuclear, attorneys representing three residents of Kingston and Plymouth say Entergy violated the federal Clean Water Act more than 33,000 times by discharging heated water and other pollutants into Cape Cod Bay. Because of those alleged violations, they're talking about seeking $831 million in damages.

In a separate notice to the state Department of Environmental Protection, a larger group of local residents from communities around the plant is threatening to sue Entergy and the state for failing to ensure that Pilgrim meets requirements under a joint federal and state discharge permit for the plant.

You see, to cool the condensers at the Pilgrim, the nuke plant takes in more than 500 million gallons of seawater from Cape Cod Bay, according to Pine duBois, executive director of the Jones River Watershed Association in Kingston and party to both potential lawsuits. In doing so, the plant traps or kills fish in the process, and then discharges heated water back into the bay.

Meanwhile, the anti-Cape Wind group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, is looking to pile on the lawsuits in an effort to the stop the wind turbine project because of its deep environmental concern for the "pristine" Sound.

In its latest suit, which is just one of five federal suits facing Cape Wind, the alliance is making the "principled argument" that the turbines will seriously jeopardize four federally protected species, included sea turtles and several species of migratory birds.

The plaintiffs in that suit include Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

"Nantucket Sound provides critical wildlife habitat to numerous rare species," Kyla Bennett of PEER told the Statehouse News Service in a prepared statement. "Cape Wind would destroy this vital habitat and harm the species that rely on it for feeding, breeding and migration. That's what makes this project so devastating."

So, we have one group of environmentally concerned folks worried about wildlife in the face of a project that hasn't been built yet, and another group of environmentally concerned folks who oppose something that already exists.

But never the twain shall meet. The anti-nuke lot tends to support Cape Wind. On the other hand, the anti-Cape Wind crowd has no problem with nuke power, it was the last environmental group on Earth to say something about boaters dumping raw sewage into the "pristine" Sound, and it apparently doesn't see a contradiction in folks driving around with bumper stickers that simultaneously declare: "Stop Cape Wind" and "plovers taste like chicken."

Of course, it should be obvious to any fair-minded person that a principled argument about protecting the environment ought to show the same level of concern whether you're talking about an existing energy plant killing wildlife in Cape Cod Bay or a planned energy project that might kill wildlife in Nantucket Sound. Unless, of course, we're not talking about principles.

People are free to focus on one project or another. Whatever. But let's call pragmatic opportunism what it is.

Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed or surprised by the mind-numbing levels of political deception most of us have come to accept as the norm. (And for the record, lest I be accused of falling for another political fad — false equivalence — of the two groups I have in mind, one actually has organic ties to the environmental movement and the other, not so much).

It's just sometimes I wish we would stop pretending to be debating principles when we're not. We're arguing about trade-offs and how to apportion them, which means, ultimately, it's an argument about power dressed up as altruistic concern for others. And the sooner we are honest about that, the sooner we can start having real debates that actually move us toward solving problems.